SHAH MAT - il re è morto

Concept, direction: Eva Costa, Anna Estdahl
with Eva Costa, Anna Estdahl, Ivan Sturpia
Sound design: Stefania De Cristofaro

Production: La Città del Teatro di Cascina, Pisa, Italy 2010
Inspired by Le città invisibili (Italo Calvino)

Shah Mat is a trace, a first “travel experiment” through the Invisible Cities of I. Calvino. Produced and realized at La Città del Teatro, the project has been devised, written and imaged to be hosted in ex-Metarock, a place not conventionally used as a theater.
 The working group composed of Eva Costa, Anna Estdahl, Stefania De Cristofaro worked directly in the location for a limited time of three months.
From the meeting with the text of Calvino the desire comes and then the need to investigate a space to develop it, looking among its infinite possibilities to be inhabited.
 In this first stage, the subtle geometry of each existence and the inexorable alternatives that are offered with every encounter with the Other move like pawns on a chessboard. Invisible is the attempt to meet each other in a place where relationships and loneliness in their possible forms keep in balance the boundary between the physical and the mental space; it is our inner city, the sound that a thought has when it gains legitimacy of existence.

To the cities we live in, the cities that we are looking for, the memory, the dreams and the music they create.